 Welcome, everyone. Thank you for joining us here at the Mechanics Institute at 57 Post Street in San Francisco. I'm Laura Shepard, director of events, and we're very pleased to welcome you to our second program of the Rising Writers Series. And tonight, we're very pleased to welcome Daniel Gumbiner for his new book, The Boat Builder, which was nominated for the National Book Award. And Daniel will be in conversation with local writer Kevin Smokler. Before we begin, I'd like to find out how many of you are new to the Mechanics Institute. Who's never been here before? Wonderful. Welcome. So I'd like to invite you to come back on a Wednesday at noon and take a free tour of our incredible library, which is on the second and third floors. Also, you'll see our International Chest Club, which is right down the hallway. And you'll also get an introduction to our programs and our history. Well, first of all, we were founded in 1854, so we have a long, long history here in San Francisco. Also, our programming includes author events such as these, a Friday Night Cinema Lit Film Series. The library has ongoing writers groups and book clubs, Proust Group, Technology Classes. And the Chest Club has an ongoing tournament series and chest classes for all ages and levels. So it's all happening here seven days a week, so we hope that you'll take the tour, become a member, and become part of our ever-growing cultural family here in downtown San Francisco. Also, I want to mention that at the end of our program, books will be on sale for both authors. We are also very pleased to be cosponsoring this event with McSweeney's of San Francisco. And we welcome those of you who are here through McSweeney's. And now I'd like to also introduce our co-curator, Ted Joya. Ted is a critic who lives in San Francisco and his work has appeared in The Believer, The American Scholar, Los Angeles Review of Books. It's nice that the Virginia Quarterly Review and other publications. Currently, he is writing a book of essays about the evolution of California culture framed through food and the arts. Ted is also the former Partnerships Director of McSweeney's and of course, as I mentioned, he's an ongoing co-curator for the Rising Writers Series here at the Mechanics Institute. He is also the founder of the site Fork Tong, interviewing food critics on the future of food writing. So please welcome Ted Joya. Hello and welcome to the second reading in the Rising Writers Series. It's a pleasure to have you all here tonight. The seat for the series started when I first moved to San Francisco and a friend told me that young writers just don't come to San Francisco anymore. And that seemed to be the popular wisdom. But so I came to Laura with the idea for the series because I was dissatisfied with this conventional wisdom, dissatisfied with the way, in fact, that many people talk about the Bay Area literary landscape today. So much talk is focused on the past. When people think of San Francisco fiction, they think of the 50s, of the Beats or the 2000s with Eggers or New Yorkers vacationing to Noe Valley for a week to write a quick caricature of Silicon Valley. But nothing about what it actually means to be a young writer on the ground in the Bay Area today. Not 1955, not 2002, but right now in 2019. Because right now is an exhilarating literary moment with a boom of great first novels by diverse writers in our own backyard. But it's a moment that goes under discussed. And we hope this series can be a forum to explore that sinuous question by offering a stage for emerging writers to have real talk about the issues, inspirations, and anxieties that matter to young writers in California today. And that's why we're so glad to partner with McSweeney, a legendary independent publisher. We have a couple great, we have Brian Dice, who's the president of McSweeney's and Eric, who is also on the McSweeney staff. For those who don't know, McSweeney's there's probably not been a better engine for emerging, exciting, fresh fiction in the Bay Area and beyond in the last 20 years, the McSweeney's. They've championed writers from Michelle T. to Wells Towers, to Hilton Owes, and many, many more than I could possibly name. And the latest in that line is Tonight's Reader, Daniel Gumbeener. Daniel was born and raised in Northern California. He graduated from UC Berkeley in 2011 and now lives in Las Vegas, where he works as the managing editor of The Believer. His first book, The Boat Builder, was longlisted for the National Book Award and is a finalist for the California Book Awards. And I've read few books that capture that spiritual texture of Northern California, as well as Daniel's first novel. And he will be in conversation with another great cultural figure here, Kevin Smokler. Kevin is a writer, performer, and interdisciplinary maestro. He's the author of three books, most recently Brat Pack America, a love letter to 80s teen movies out now. His essays and cultural criticism have appeared in Salon, Buzzfeed, the LA Times, and NPR. On stage, he's interviewed actors, offers, and directors at libraries, universities, and festivals nationwide. And he is currently in the middle of directing a documentary on the contemporary comeback of vinyl records in America. So with that introduction, I am delighted to introduce Daniel and Kevin. All right. I was told to give the people a little taste of what we're in for this evening. And so, what we are in for this evening. At 28 years old, Eli Berg Koningsberg has never encountered a challenge he couldn't push through until a concussion leaves him with a lingering headaches and a weakness for opiates. Berg moves to a remote Northern California town to seek space and time to recover, but soon finds himself breaking into homes in search of pills. Added by addiction and chronic pain, Berg meets Alejandro, a reclusive master boat builder and begins to see a path forward. Alejandro offers Berg honest labor, but more importantly, a new approach to his suffering, a template for survival amid immense pain. Nurtured by his friendship with Alejandro and aided by the comradeship of many of Tallina's colorful residents, Berg begins to return to himself. Written in gleaming prose. This is a story about resilience, community, and what it takes to win back your soul. I agree. I had a great time reading it, absolutely. So we are catching you with kind of the tail end of your tour here. Tell us how it's been so far. Yeah, it's been good. Well, I mean, thank you to everyone for coming out here and to the Mechanics Institute for having me. It's really an honor to be here. You guys are either, I can't tell if you guys like aren't Warriors fans or you just really love literature, but I'm glad you're here. Could be both. Could be both. But tour, yeah, tour. There were sort of two phases to it. The first phase was more when the book first came out and no one had read it because it had just come out. So it was kind of, you know, more the work of the event was explaining it to someone who had no concept of it. And then the second phase of it, more people had read it. So it was interesting to kind of hear from people and interact with people who sort of knew what the book was about and had some framework of it. But yeah, it's kind of winding down now. This is one of the, I think will be one of the last events I do for it. Do you think you will miss this kind of thing or is it like, thank God it's winding down? I think I feel ready to move forward. Yeah, I've just, it's a funny thing about book publishing which is just that, you know, moves at a very, moves at a glacial speed. So, you know, by the time this book is coming out, you know, I had already been thinking about other projects and working on other projects. And so to return to it was an interesting experience too, to kind of come back and reacquaint myself with the work after not really being in the midst of it. We were talking about this earlier, but it's kind of, you know, it feels you process it in different ways after you've finished it than when you're going through it. And then there are sort of, like any experience, you know, we were talking about sort of the analogy of like college, when you come out of college, it's sort of like, you know, there are, people ask you how your experience was and you tell stories about it, you know, and maybe there are like some threads that you carry through and or anecdotes that you tell often, but it's not, obviously you're not conveying the whole experience of the thing. So I think it's a little bit similar. I'm assuming you kept your day job while you were doing all this stuff while you were touring. So tell me about like, to put it sloppily, tell me about this sort of view from the other side of the desk or I guess I would ask it, who are you when you're editing a magazine versus writing a novel? Yeah, yeah. So I work as the managing editor of The Believer, which used to be published by McSweeney's and is now published out of UNLV in Las Vegas. I think they're different mindsets, but they're related. I think the sort of mind space I'm in, when I'm working on something or when I'm writing is much more open and accepting and looking to kind of just move wherever the story takes me and to not be super critical of what I'm doing and really thinking too closely about whether or not something's working in a given moment and just kind of trying to pay attention to the flow of my thinking. Whereas with editing, you're much more critical. You're looking to notice sort of discrepancies in the work or problems you're fault finding. And if you fault find too much, I think, when you're working on something creative, you can trip yourself up. And so there's a bit of, but at the same time, you need that faculty too to revise your work and at some point you need to step back and look at it with that mindset too. So I think it is helpful to practice that, or it's helpful to me to practice that as an editor too and to have that skill and sort of be flexing that muscle in my regular job. The mistakes that first time novelists make are not hard to find that they are. In the book you mean. No, no, no, I'm talking culturally speaking, historically speaking, like a rogues gallery of mistakes, first time novelist mistakes are legendary and well-known and oft quoted. I'm assuming that you are aware of many of these and so I'm curious which ones you had in mind while you were writing, if nothing else, than to steer clear of that. Yeah, I think that was always, I think mostly I tried to not worry about that too much for fear of what I was mentioning before, I'm just kind of like stifling my own experience and there definitely were times when I was writing where I worried about that kind of thing and I worried about the coherence of the work and the sort of solution I came to for that kind of fear was to just try and focus on what was interesting to me in any given moment, even if it didn't feel like it was gonna solve my problem. So for example, if I encountered something like that, it seems like it's veering in this direction, like melodramatic or something like that, I would just try and bring myself back to what I actually cared about in the work and in doing so, at times that made it feel as though I was putting together a bunch of disparate pieces because the thing I was interested in in a given moment didn't necessarily feel like it co-hered with the other things I had been interested in at different points in the writing process but I think over time there's this slow process of accretion where sort of the way you see the world begins to materialize by virtue of just sticking to that course because your interests do amount to something when they're sort of aggregated. Absolutely, I think the book builder is about a number of things which I think is one of my favorite things about it. It is definitely an addiction novel but it isn't like the 47th addiction novel you've read because addiction is another topic that is well trod ground in fiction. So, and I find a particular, I've never attempted to write fiction but I think as a reader I find it particularly hard to bring new light to the experience of addiction and literature and I feel for novelists who try. So I'm curious what research and other novels informed you in writing a novel about addiction and what pitfalls did you try and avoid? Yeah, yeah, so addiction, it is a big part of the book but I think what I was more interested in in the story was the experience of pain that precipitated the addiction and sort of the different methods of what one does when one encounters chronic pain and that's sort of the main character in the book, Berg has suffered this head injury and as a result of this head injury he has chronic headaches and he's prescribed pills for the headaches and that's ultimately what leads him to the addiction but the sort of what I see as one of the central questions of the book is kind of just like what do you do when things sort of aren't getting better for you and he tries a lot of stuff to deal with these headaches and they're just a constant part of his life and so part of what he's trying to figure out is how to, often we're told that story of healing in which pain is eliminated from the equation. It's like something is going wrong and then it's fixed and in this story it's more like something is going wrong and it continues to go wrong and so what do you do when that, how do you live a meaningful life when that is a constant? And so his experience with boat building is part of what teaches him to move forward in a way because I don't know how many of you have experience with Kraft but part of what Berg is trying to do and part of the reason he becomes addicted is because he's trying to escape what's happening to him as opposed to just sort of accepting that it's the reality of what's transpiring and the working through boat building kind of allows him to bring his attention to the reality of things as they are. In when you're working in boat building if you have, say you're working on a joint like the pieces of wood either fit together or they don't, right? You can't kid yourself about what the state of things are whereas in your mind if you're thinking about like whether or not you're doing okay or like psychologically you can kind of twist things and kid yourself but what boat building does for him is it kind of brings him into the present moment and forces him to acknowledge things as they are and sort of like trains that faculty of mind and sort of strayed off your question but that's, yeah, addiction, I think the thing that was interesting to me or about Berg's character or the thing that I wanted to explore was that sort of central question of how one approaches something that doesn't improve. Straying is where the interesting things happen. I think it's really interesting that for a novel that is so much about physical things, objects, physical labor, working with one's hands, you would think that choice, as a reader I would think that choice would kind of burrow its way into the skin of the novel and it would be a novel that would be very plot heavy at the same time where the act of being about objects would reflect itself in a novel that would be very concrete and specific with event as well and yet this is not a novel where a lot of big things happen, this is a novel where things kind of exist between life's bigger moments. Tell us about that choice, what our Yiddish brethren would refer to as Schmeing, i.e., hanging around. Yeah, there is a lot of hanging out. I think that sort of goes back to what I was saying before about just sort of my focusing on what was interesting to me or what I sort of found myself naturally attracted to and I don't know if I thought about it very sort of rationally as a choice as I was writing the book, I think and it's interesting stepping back from it now and seeing that it was a choice that I was making along the way but I don't know if I was necessarily thinking like, oh okay, I didn't set out to write a book that didn't have that much plot, it was sort of just like the things I was interested in happen to not be plot and it's interesting because the new novel that I just finished a draft of, I think is actually pretty plot heavy and it just so happened that that was where that story took me. But yeah, I don't know if it was a super conscious choice. Laura or Pam, could I get a glass of water? I'm gonna start sounding like George Burns in a minute. The, I love how much of The Boat Builder is about place, a specific place, I'm the kind of reader who gets a real flea in my ear about those kind of things. If I read a novel that takes place in Indianapolis, I start saying, well why Indianapolis? Why not Terre Haute? The kind of thing I do, so thank you. And as such, I think that's a really interesting pairing with how much of, we sort of, as the readers, we kind of enter this book about 30% of the way through. Maybe even more than that, meaning a lot of stuff has happened before page one. And I really, I'm a big fan of that kind of storytelling technique. There was a video game from 1,000 years ago called Missed where like you, where like, I played it, yeah. Yeah, exactly, you start the game and it's like the whole game has happened before like you ever, you, the protagonist ever show up. Yeah, I was really just trying to write Missed. Yeah, exactly, exactly, except on a boat. But it puts the protagonist in a really interesting position then because so much of the story has happened already and you're sort of being guided through it by the protagonist and you almost want to say, you almost want to say, well can I rewind? Can I go to before page one and find out what happened back there? So how do you conceive of the job of the protagonist then? Because so much of the story is happening around him and happened before we got there. So we don't have access to that through him. Yeah, I mean there was a lot more in the first draft that was then cut out. And so there was one of the, so the original draft was actually told from two perspectives. So that's one thing that's really different. It would toggle between the Alejandro's perspective and Berg's perspective and the Finnish book is just Berg's perspective. And it also had a lot more flashbacks and a lot more backstory that sort of like filled in some of those things maybe in a more detailed manner. But when I was going through the editing process, one of the early readers said to me that, he felt that I was obscuring the elements of the forward moving plot with the flashbacks that I didn't truly understand what was happening in the forward moving plot and that I was flashing back to kind of just like get out of it essentially. And he advised me to cut all of the flashbacks and just see, or cut most of the flashbacks and just see what I had there in the forward moving story. And yeah, the other thing he said to me was, he was like, no one ever finished a book and was like, man, I really love that book, but I wish there were more flashbacks. Yeah, man, yeah. So I did that and it did, he was right. I was, there were certain aspects of the story. What I realized was that essentially I was mostly telling Berg's story and that the story was meant to be told from his perspective and his perspective only. And so I changed that and then I also kind of eliminated many of these flashbacks and so that's how it ended up in its current form. And so there was sort of like one big first draft and one big second draft and those were like the kind of like seismic moments, but that's how it ended up starting in that way. I love your choice that the ending is not only open ended, but sparse in terms of words on the page and the voice of the author at the ending. Most, in my experience, a lot of fiction endings are particularly verbose because the, and I'm guilty of this too, the author realizes they're running out of time or they've come to the ending and there's a whole lot of things they wanna say. It almost feels like a trait borrowed from musical theater where you realize you're at the finale and you have to sing really loudly and hold the note at the very end. So I'm interested in that choice of yours. Tell me about the ending and why there's so little said. Yeah, the ending, that is I think always the hardest thing to write and to know where to end something. I think with this story, I didn't want one thing that I very much didn't want to do was I didn't want to make it seem as though, I mean, without giving too much away. I didn't wanna make it seem as though like everything was solved because again, as I sort of mentioned earlier, the story is in large part about the experience of like not having things solved for you. And so I think that is maybe part of what gives it an open-ended feeling is you're like, I mean, what happens to Berg? I think he has certainly changed as a person but I don't know if it's necessarily clear what will happen to him. It's open-ended right down to the title because we don't know who the title refers to. Yeah, yeah, that's sort of like built into the title a little bit of like who is the boat builder? Is it Berg or is it Alejandro? But I liked the title because I felt like it drew attention to sort of like the central focus of the book and the main work of the book. You done any boat building? I have, yeah, so I actually, when I started writing this book, I was taking a class with a man named Bob Dar who teaches boat building in Sausalito and he has a Saturday class that he no longer teaches anymore, he's retired but it's now taught by two of his former students and it's an hour long class, or sorry, it's a one day, it's an eight hour class but it's one day a week on Sundays and for the first part of it, you sort of, Bob teaches the whole class like a sort of general lesson. You're basically working on one of the boats that he's building at any given time together and then for the second part of the class you work on your own skills and it's very kind of like programmatic, you can't advance to the next skill until you've learned how to do the first one sufficiently and that was sort of where I first started thinking about the book, I didn't go into the class not thinking I wanna write a book about boat building but I was interested in boats, I thought wooden boats were, I was interested in them as aesthetic objects and I found them very beautiful and I wanted to learn more about their construction and I took the class and in the middle of the class between those two periods, basically everyone sits around at this circular table in the middle of the workshop and kind of just hangs out and talks and Bob would tell stories about living on Tamales Bay and he used to have a boat shop on Tamales Bay and part of it was that Bob was just a really incredible storyteller and was very compelling to listen to but it was also that he was telling stories about sort of like the landscape and the place and the county that I was from in a way that felt very resonant and that I hadn't heard someone tap into just in terms of like the strangeness of this rural place meeting that is also close to an urban center and is infused with this kind of like old West and hippie influence and the sort of strange mix that that creates an environment that that creates and I thought I've never actually heard of a book that was set in that particular place and that's kind of how I really first started thinking about the book through Bob's stories and thinking about that as a setting before I really had any of the characters or any of the other components of the book conceived of. I had, I did this sort of thing one time with a puppeteer who talked about how his left shoulder was about like 20% larger than the rest than his right shoulder because he had to spend all of his time like this with his hand controlling the puppet. That can't be good for you. No, no, he had to like specially design shirts and suit coats to have a bigger left shoulder. Or he would just go home and lift his other arm for like the whole day. Yeah, it was insensitive of me to not ask how he solved this problem but what are the equivalent deformed left shoulders of boat building? What are the occupational and physical hazards of this? Well, I mean, there's a lot of ways you can get hurt. You mean like physical. Yeah, how does it leave its marks on one's body if you do this thing avidly? I think in many ways it's actually pretty good for you because it is sort of like when you're working on a boat you're casually physical throughout the day. You're outside. That being said, there are definitely things that can go wrong. There are chemicals involved on occasion. There are obviously very sharp tools that you can hurt yourself with if you're not careful. And that is also another thing that kind of like breeds focus is you're like this thing is really sharp. I should look at what I'm doing with it. But yeah, I think in many ways it can be a very healthy profession for you because it is physical but not excessively so. And I think it's also, it's just a very pleasant occupation. Like everything smells nice, like the wood smells nice, the place that you're working is usually physically attractive and pleasant and often by the water. So there's a lot about it that's really nice. But yeah, you can hurt yourself for sure. If any boat building injuries that? Nothing serious. No, I like, you know, I've nicked myself here and there. But yeah. If you and Berg ran into each other at an event here at the Mechanics, would you recognize one another? Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think all of the, I would recognize all of the characters in the book in a way because, you know, I think part of myself is in all of them in some inflected form. None of them are like one to ones of any person in my life or myself. But I think they're all, you know, to a certain extent voices and the experiences of my life definitely infuse, you know, the experiences that they have in the book too. There's definitely a bit of a Steinbeck quality to it that you're kind of, you know, in a neighborhood and people drift in and out and you can run into someone, you know, coming this way or you may not see for another 90 pages, sir. Yeah, he was a big influence. In fact, you know, I had read several of his books but I had never read Canary Row and one of the early readers of the book, after they read it was like, you need to read Canary Row because this book is really similar to Canary Row. Point Ray's Row or something. Yeah, which was then after I read it, I was like, wow, that's a very nice thing of that person to say. I don't know if it's totally true, but I do admire his work a lot, yeah. Tell me what other writers you walk in the footsteps of. Yeah, I mean, Steinbeck, I think, is someone who was definitely influential for me. Wallace Degner, I think, is another person who was really important to me, particularly when I was younger, when I was in college. I think he was the first person who I read, who I felt like captured something of what it felt like to grow up in the West and to sort of feel a little bit like you are outside of the main thrust of the culture and to describe the sort of chaotic experience of culture in the West, to the kind of like hodgepodge nature of it, but also the beauty and the grandeur. And so he was really important. I felt really connected to him in college. And another Western writer who's important to me, Mary Austin, who's the naturalist who wrote beautifully about the Mojave Desert, I think she's someone who I've engaged with closely more recently because I now live in Las Vegas. So that's someone who I think about a lot down there. More contemporary writers, Alejandro Zambra, someone who was really important to me in terms of just the sort of the quiet strength of his work. He's very tender, but he's also strong. And I find that really admirable and interesting. I enjoy being in his brain. Clairvay Watkins is another person who I really admire her ambition and her sort of sense of inventiveness at the level of the line, but also in sort of the broader picture of her books and just kind of like the heart of her books are really wonderful. So those are, yeah, those are a few. You wanna tell us about this new novel you just turned into a draft of? Yeah, yeah, so it's called Paradise. It's set in Nevada and it's sort of a, it's a story of a, there are four main characters and they're kind of like all orbiting around this corruption scandal that's happening involving a police department. And one of them is an MMA fighter and it's him and his trainer and then the other two are journalists. And so the story kind of moves between the city and the sort of countryside of Nevada. And it's kind of a, I think it's, my hope is that it reads like, it explores some of what is really beautiful about that place, which is where I live now in terms of it's just kind of vast openness. It's both in its cities and in the country. It's a place that is very accepting, has very few rules and there's a lot that is really beautiful about that and there's a lot that is problematic too. And so that's kind of a lot what this, part of what this book is exploring. I'm gonna ask one more thing and then we're gonna open it up to questions from the audience. I'd like you to tell us about the last great book you read that was absolutely nothing like The Boat Builder. Yes. I think it would have to be Megan O'Geeblon's Interior States. I don't know if anyone's read that. It came out this year, but it's a series of essays and I really think it's like not an exaggeration to say she's like the Joan Didion of the Midwest. Like she writes these essays about the Midwest that are so both full of love, but also highly critical and sensitive to the nuances of the place. And it's interesting too because she is a, I mean, one of the things, there's a lot of stuff that's really great about the book, but one of the things that's really special about it is she's very interested in trying to understand people who have radically different beliefs than her, which in this particular political moment is incredibly refreshing, I think. And that's in part because her own biography is one of kind of crossing the pale of belief she was raised as an incredibly fundamentalist Christian and then fell out and went to like one of the major Christian colleges, but then fell out of the church when she was in college and ended up becoming a writer. And so the book kind of intersperses her own story and her own life in terms of living in the Midwest throughout that period with these sort of more regional observations. And so I think it's a special book and I think she has a gift in that sense of being able to pay attention to people and listen to people with whom she has very foundational disagreements. How do you not read her name? Megan O'Geeblon. O'Geeblon? Yeah. It's spelled kind of strangely, but I can write it down for you later. Something, states, what's the? Interior states. Interior states. Yeah, it's her first book. Because the world is actually the size of this table right here, her agent is a high school classmate of mine. Oh wow. And he sent me a note recently saying, saying, hey, I got this book coming out and I don't know if you're gonna like it, but the author went to Michigan and that's where we're from and it's a lot of, it's a female SAS and she's writes about what you just described and it's a little Maggie Nelson and it's a little Leslie James. So I'm like, just stop talking, just send it to me. Like now, now, just tell me where I can get it. Like he knows me, that was all he had to say. And I was already in and now, based on what you said, I think, I don't know why I'm sitting here and not reading it. Yeah, yeah, she's a talent, yeah. Daniel, thank you. Thank you. Great, appreciate it, absolutely. We have some time for some questions. Who out there has one? Oh, do we have to wait for the microphone to get over here? Tell me your way, testing one too. I actually have, well I guess one is more of a comment and one is more of a question, so I'll start with the comment. I thought what you said about backstory was really fascinating. Cause I think that that is one of the faux pas of the first novel and I think when we write the first novels there's this, we're explaining to ourselves how this person got to where he or she is, so we have to write all this backstory and then we think we need it. But you know, and maybe sometimes we do, whatever, but the idea of pairing that all away and just looking at what the forward moving story is is a really interesting, I'm gonna borrow that and talk to my students about that, cause I think that's really interesting. Making things happen in here, that's awesome. I said we're making things happen in here, that's awesome. And then my question is, can you talk, I'm very curious to hear about your decision to fictionalize the name of the town. And I'm just curious, I have my thoughts on why you may have done that and but I'm more interested in hearing you talk about why you did that, projecting onto you. Yeah, I think, I think it fictionalizing the town allowed me to sort of let the town shape shift in a way that was natural to the actual story and kind of like the emotional truth of the story, emotional heart of it. And so I think I didn't want to get caught up in kind of like trying to nail down the exact reality of a thing so much as I wanted to capture the feeling of it. And so that was, that allowed me to do that. It allowed me to pick the things from that region and that place that felt emblematic or that felt important to be in there without having to be concerned of whether or not it was an exact reproduction of the thing. Yeah. I haven't read the book, so I don't know if there's, there's an obvious answer to this, but you talked about trying to have a strong sense of place and the feeling of the landscape and the city and the towns nearby. What about time? Did you try to write to today or to some contemporary sense of where we are? I mean, yeah, what did you think about that? Like you thought about it. Like time moving, like what about time as moving through the book? Or what about just like in- This moment in time, 2018, 19, yeah. Yeah, I think I did want it to be in the contemporary moment. And so I was, yeah, that was something that was on my mind in terms of, you know, in little nuances of crafting the story. Do, was it, I mean, how do you do that when you write fiction? Do you, I mean, how do you do that without being too obvious without throwing in, you know, like the president's name or something? I don't know, I don't write fiction. Yeah, no, I know, because it can be, it can feel like, oh, here's this marker for, you know, like, and then he took out his iPhone. But, yeah, but I think, I think it's a feel thing, you know, it's like a, as with so much of writing, it's a trial and error process where you are kind of like testing a thing and then you look at it and does it feel right? And if it doesn't, then you have to cut it. And that's sort of the thing, that's one of the things that I learned to be better at over the process of writing this book was just trusting myself that there was a better thing waiting for me and that I didn't have to just go with the thing that I had written because I wanted to be done, you know, so often we just, we get impatient because we, for whatever reason, you know, we wanna be done or it's frustrating and we don't like that we don't have an answer and so we settle for something that we know doesn't work. And so part of what I was learning to do throughout the process was to just pay attention to when I knew it didn't work and really listen to that because it's so easy to gloss over that and be like, well, like, I'm just gonna keep going. And sometimes you do need to keep going, right? So if you get caught up on one detail for too long, but the better thing to do, I think is just mark it down and be like, that doesn't work and put like a symbol in there, TK, whatever you use, you know, and just be like that, I didn't figure that out yet and keep moving that way as opposed to trying to decide that it was finished. And so I think I sort of applied that kind of thinking to details of that nature. You mentioned that you took the suggestions, the substantial suggestions of some early readers and I was wondering who are those readers and how do you know that they're the right ones? Yeah, well, those suggestions were from someone who had mentored me in different ways who I trusted a lot. So I think that was part of what made me available to the suggestions. But yeah, it is really hard to know who to trust with your work. I mean, I had that experience with this new novel too that I'm just finishing up of just, when you give someone a work of art, they're gonna have a really different reaction. Everyone has a really different reaction to it. There's a reason like Goodreads is like so crazy and everyone has so many different opinions. It's the same thing when you hand a manuscript to someone and so you have to figure out what to listen to and what resonates with you and what to discard and what doesn't feel useful. My friend, Caitlin, who is a poet in Vegas, she's funny, she's like, she has this policy where she says, trust no one. But you do need to trust someone, right? So yeah, it's just, again, it's kind of like a feel thing of being like, does this seem right to me? Does this criticism feel reasonable and like it would help? And if not, discard it. Also, the weight of what you're asking too, like asking someone to read a poem is different than asking someone to read a novel. A novel is a substantial investment of time and unless you're kind of dead inside, an investment of emotional energy too. And I think the first, this novel, the first novel, people were eager to read it because they were like, oh, it's like Daniel's first novel but now with the second book everyone's like, okay, another one, like gotta read this again. Pretend you don't know those people and find a whole new set too. I'm really impressed just by the number of characters that you talk about because you're describing this whole town and I'm just wondering about how you just managed all the people and how you knew when is too much to describe about a person and how you can, yeah. Yeah, that was like, that was one of the most enjoyable parts of writing the book to me, I think was getting to, you know, I really enjoy working with those secondary characters and you know, many of them actually, like I mentioned before, there was an earlier draft that had a much more, that was much longer and a lot of those people had a more prominent role in that draft and then they were paired away and in some ways I think, you know, I miss them having a bigger sort of, them being more central in the book but I also thought it gave the book a feeling of fullness to have them in there and to sort of like know what they were about and kind of like, you were mentioning of like, you know, it ends up being when you cut away that all of that backstory, it's still there. Like you still know what it is and so in some ways it functions as like an outline and those characters are feel like lived and real even if you don't get their whole, you don't get the whole vision of them but it's for you as a writer it's helpful because you've had to sketch out their whole reality and so I think that's, yeah that's, I guess that's, I don't know if that answers your question exactly but yeah. It's very much like what actors do with the backstory of their character when they present on stage, you're not getting the whole backstory but you're seeing in the present, it's very, very similar. Yeah. Question back here. Hey Daniel, I'm intrigued and curious about your new novel, Paradise and the characters that you described as well as the setting. If you could talk a little bit about what was the inspiration and the research behind the MMA fighter, the trainer and the police department because I assume that that's not part of your upbringing or your natural environment is. Yeah it was just sort of, you know it was drawn from experiences I had living in Nevada and so just kind of like taking in different elements of that universe and you know like I had mentioned to Kevin earlier just seeing like oh that's kind of, you know the MMA stuff was in part interesting to me because I really didn't understand it and it's a mixed martial arts fighting. It's like the very intense, yeah sort of like boxing but you can do other stuff. If programming was real, it would be MMA fighters. So are the researchers training though? Was I training? Are the researchers training though? No, no, yeah no I did, although I did go to amateur fight with that actually was one of my friends roommates was a, he is an interior designer and he is also an amateur MMA fighter and yeah he's like this little guy absolutely ripped and so we went to go see him fight and it was in this one of the sort of off strip casinos that are for locals and it's really intense because it's super long. You go for like the amateur fights, I don't know if you've been to one but yeah they're like four hours and you see like 15 different fights or whatever so we went to go see it. So I did some stuff like that, that kind of research but yeah it was just sort of one of those things. I mean with that I think I just didn't, when I got to Las Vegas I realized it was a really big part of the culture and that it was important for some reason and also seemed kind of like particular to the place. It didn't seem quite as important in other cities and so I thought that was interesting and I wanted to understand it more and that's how I started to look into that. Any other questions? Okay right here. Hi I have a question about structure. I'm really curious about the idea of structure as a container for your intuition and you had talked in the very beginning of the talk about like kind of sniffing out your interest and knowing when you're on it and when you're not and I'm wondering if structure plays a part in that for you at all? Yeah I think structure feels like a component of that to me, it feels like something that you need to pay attention to whether or not it's working. I'm not someone who really like plans very much in part because I think what I enjoy about writing is kind of finding something unexpected and I think if I were to plan out the structure of my novel and know kind of what was gonna happen I would get bored. Part of what's interesting to me is moving through something and then finding out where it's gonna go. So I don't think about structure too much over the course of like writing the work but I think retrospectively it is important to look at and I think kind of like apply that same type of mindset of just thinking like does this feel like it is structured as it should be or would it work smoother now that I'm outside of it and I can look down on it from sort of a more panoramic view? Well I guess my question's a little bit related. You had talked a lot about or a little bit about moving, concentrating on the moving forward in the novel as a way to keep yourself working and also to keep the, obviously to keep the plot moving. When you did encounter, if you did encounter major creative roadblocks where you found yourself absolutely psychologically stuck you didn't know where you were gonna go next. How did you overcome that? And did those things tend to be more of a crisis of confidence that you weren't sure that you could find your way out of the mess or was it more the story is not leading me anywhere that will make sense or that will make this work? Yeah, usually I would like go outside for a run or something, you know like do something different or work on a different part of the book maybe but yeah I mean I think you do so much of the creative process is just like finding your way and knowing when you're up against something that isn't working and instead of just trying to like yank it so that it works just like paying attention to the resistance and being like oh there's resistance here, that's interesting I wonder why that is the case and sort of registering that and usually once you get to that point of registering it you've figured out that you're able to see what's wrong. So much of the time you can't see what's wrong because you're trying to make something different you know and that trying blinds us to actually looking at the thing itself. So rather than forcing it it was more recognizing the path was there it was about trying to get it revealed. Yeah, recognizing the resistance and then usually once I was able to recognize that I was able to see what about it was upsetting to me or it didn't work then you have to go fix it but yeah, yeah. What did Alejandro say? Like don't race through the task too quickly just be in the task. Yeah, yeah some of that is in the book you know like in some of that is sort of. Like that for a person. Right, yeah so yeah that is I think there's definitely a correlation between some of those things. We didn't just graft it on your novel without your consent. Any other questions? Comments? Increase? Okay well with that I'd like to thank Daniel Gumbiner and Kevin Smokler for a wonderful conversation and also special thanks to Ted Joyer and also I just want to remind you that our next program is on May 1st, Wednesday at 6.30 with Namwally Serpal and Lydia Kiesling. So please join us for our next Rising Writers. Thank you for coming. Don't forget to mention the book sale. Oh and books for sale. A man can sell some books here.